In reading that this is Bill Gates last appearance at CES [Consumer Electronics Show] I got to thinking, was Gates lucky the first time? Could he repeat in 2008 what he did in 1978? What this question is not asking is can an entrepreneur start a company and become rich beyond his or her wildest dreams in 2008? That question has been answered over and over again by people like Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google In reading that this is Bill Gates last appearance at CES [Consumer Electronics Show] I got to thinking, was Gates lucky the first time? Could he repeat in 2008 what he did in 1978?What this question is not asking is can an entrepreneur start a company and become rich beyond his or her wildest dreams in 2008?That question has been answered over and over again by people like Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google or Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, YouTube founders. What I’m asking is can one person or one company create a high tech empire upon which almost all of the follow on technology is based?Is it just the Windows operating system we are talking about here? Yes and no. Windows is at the heart of everything Microsoft has become. But at the same time, the creation of Office cements the deal. It, too, had to become essential, the backbone of everything we do or the operating system might have gone in another direction. It is the combination of an operating system with a can’t do without set of applications that makes the picture complete.Each feeds off and guarantees the success of the other. Certainly, on a smaller scale the two Steves at Apple came close. Linus Torvalds should also get some credit but I’m not ready to award him the brass ring.Is it Google? They obviously see the relationship between operating environment, if not operating system, and the need to create essential applications within that environment. And while Google Search is about as defacto a search engine as Windows is an operating system, Google Apps is by no means a must have suite of software. So to the question can a person, a team or a company become as dominate in the 21st Century as Gates and company became in the 20th Century I think the answer is no, mainly for two reasons.Here’s why. The world wide web has reached critical mass in terms of what services and applications it is capable of delivering. it can deliver just about anything you want to imagine.At the same time the Internet is so successful it has created the desire for an all enveloping single network, IP. That combination I believe replaces the old Microsoft formula for success. Where this will lead us, I’m not sure. But wherever it leads, it is the two teats of the ‘Net and IP that everything else will suckle from. Technology Industry